If This Is A Pokeman
by chutup
Summary: Ten years since the invasion of Johto. Ten years of violence, oppression and civil war. When we were children we thought training Pokemon would be a grand adventure, but as we grew older we learned the hard lesson. A Pokemon is a weapon, nothing more.
1. Ecruteak Spring Massacre, 1998

In the dark distance of the night, the pounding of the Voltorbs burst on the horizon. The clouds flickered with a light almost unearthly in its paleness. The rain from the Castform sweeps soaked through their clothes, their packs, their rations. Every half hour there would come a beating of wide wings, and a squadron of Fearows would pass overhead. Zack would throw himself down in the mud along with all the others, pressing his face to the ground and waiting for the sharp pain of the concussion. If it came, he knew, taking cover would be unlikely to do them any good. But nobody wanted to just sit there and wait to die.

They were crouched in a depression surrounded by patches of trees. They were four miles from the city; not close enough to see it, only the flashes from the bombs. Zack's uniform smelled of stale sweat from the gruelling march of the day, the struggle through the poisonous jungle as the humidity pressed in around them like a vice. With one hand he clutched a pistol, tightly so it would not slip. His other hand drifted down, almost of its own accord, to touch gently the Pokeball on his belt.

There were no tents, and no lights. Sergeant Summers had ordered them not to make camp. As far as he was concerned, they were still preparing for combat, and should be ready to march on a moment's notice. That was what he had said an hour ago, before he went back to the far side of the hill to continue arguing with Corporal Hamon. If Zack turned around now he would see their silhouettes, Summers gesticulating angrily, the Corporal sitting on a log with her arms folded across her chest.

"I'm not taking my people beyond this point." she had said. "They'll die." And that was all. The rest had been the Sergeant – shouting, threatening her, threatening the enlisted men and women who stood by her. At eleven o'clock he had balled his Pokemon and set off for the city.

"Anyone who does not march with me is guilty of dereliction of duty." He had said. "You will all be tried by the Provisional Military Court when we get back to Blackthorn. Do you understand me, soldiers?"

They were supposed to shout "Yes, sir!" but nobody did. He had walked a hundred metres through the scrub, turned back to find only a single private behind him. After a moment the boy had turned and crept back into cover, and Sergeant Summers had been alone. Fifteen minutes later he had been back shouting at the Corporal again.

If they had been real soldiers, Zack knew, they would have done as he told them. They would have marched to Ecruteak and been blown to pieces by Voltorbs or cut to shreds by the razor leaves, because that was what soldiers were for. But they weren't soldiers, only students and shop assistants and readers of political tracts, only children. They were children and Coporal Hamon was their mother.

Anna was crouched on the bank beside him. Her hair was just peeking out from beneath the green cap of her uniform, and Zack remembered how long it had been when they were at university together. It wasn't only her hair that had changed when she came back from Saffron City. When he had been in love with her in the summer two years before the war, she had laughed at everything, even things that weren't funny. It had gotten so that her constant good humour was almost irritating to the people around her, but now he missed it terribly. Saffron City had changed her, Saffron City and everything that had come after.

He wanted more than anything to break the silence of that nightmare night. All around him, everyone in the platoon was quiet and grim, their eyes turned toward the distant battlefield.

"What do you think?" he said at last. "Should we be going in?"

She looked at him as if he were whispering in church.

"There's nobody else except for us." He went on, only to fill the gap. "There's nothing we can do for them."

Anna nodded. "Tepe said something like this in one of his lectures that I saw." She said. "A true revolutionary does not fear death, but he fears being useless to his cause. If there is truly nothing we can do, then we should wait, and hope to be of use in the future."

Zack looked out at the hammering horizon once again.

"We might do something." He said. "Something more than nothing at all. We'd take a few of them with us."

"No." said a voice from behind him. "You wouldn't."

Corporal Hamon's broad shoulders loomed over him, would loom over him even if he stood up. With her cap pulled down over her face and her hair shaved to a stubble she looked almost like a man, yet there was a matriarchal aspect to the hardness in her voice.

"A platoon of green kids like yourselves, most with no prior combat experience even as trainers, going up against artillery, armour and high-level veteran Pokemon… if we were lucky, we'd take out one or two of them. Unlucky, not even that. You might die or you might surrender. From what we've heard about the POW camps in Goldenrod, you might be better to choose the former option."

"Where's Sergeant Summers?" Anna asked.

Hamon waved her hand dismissively. "He didn't say." She replied. "Where's the third one of your troop? Andrew, was it?"

"Andrei." Said Zack. "He's somewhere further down the line. He said he wants to be alone."

"Family in Ecruteak?" The Corporal asked. "Didn't know, but I guessed."

They looked down the line of soldiers, crouching or lying on their bellies. There was a dark, damp shape that might have been Andrei or might have been someone else.

Zack looked back at the city.

"He took us to meet them once." Anna said quietly. "It was autumn, and we went to see the Bell Tower."

"Lots of people got out over the past few weeks." The Corporal offered, but Anna shook her head. Zack tried to feel angry, but at that moment another flock of bird Pokemon appeared in the distance and he had to throw himself onto the ground again.

When dawn came there was a thick cloud of smoke rising from the city. Charlie caught a lucky break in the Magnetite bursts and was able to pick up a radio broadcast from Goldenrod. As they clustered around the set, the news came through that at five o'clock this morning, the Kanto Parliament had held an emergency session, and voted to declare war on the Protectorate Government.


	2. Custody of Pokemon, 1987

He had had a plan, when he was standing in the line outside the exhibition centre. When he came to the head of the line he would spit in the face of the man behind the desk, and he would shout "Pig!" and he would throw his Pokeball down on the floor and turn to go. The other kids in his class would all be surprised, impressed even, that quiet Andrei had done such a thing. As long as he kept thinking about this, the sick feeling in his stomach didn't seem so bad.

What he really wanted to do was not to be in the line at all. He wanted to run away like his brother had done, and hide in the mountains where the Protectorate soldiers would never find him. But Mark was seventeen, and Andrei was only twelve. And Mark was a trainer, a real one: he had a full team of Pokemon, and dozens more in the Pokemon Centre until he released them all into the wild last April, just before the Hoennese troops arrived and froze all the PC accounts.

Andrei only had his Cyndaquil, and it wasn't at a very high level even though he knew it was almost ready to evolve. That was the worst part, the part that made his throat feel thick and lumpy when he thought about it. There was a photo on the desk in his bedroom that his brother had sent him from Mahogany Town. "See this?" Andrei had said to his Cyndaquil. "This is what you'll look like soon! Think how much stronger you'll be!"

Now his Cyndaquil would never evolve. No, worse – she would evolve in the hands of someone else, a soldier, someone who didn't care about her at all. He had heard stories about the training camps in Hoenn, where Pokemon were pitted against each other in a production line, the weak weeded out and the strong bred for the next generation.

"That won't happen to you." he whispered, clasping the Pokeball tightly in his hands. "Dad says they don't do those things over here." _Yet_, was the word he would not allow himself to add.

Inside the exhibition hall the line of people wound like a snake between makeshift rope barriers. Dozens of Protectorate guards stood to attention along the walls, their rifles propped against their shoulders and their Pokemon crouching at their feet: Grovyles, Marshtomps, a few Blazikens. At the exit door there were vicious-looking Houndooms trained to sniff out anyone who tried to sneak a Pokeball past the doorway.

As Mrs. Malthrop, the class teacher, ushered them toward the desk, Andrei was still running through the plan in his head, all the way to the part where he wrote to his brother about what he had done. But then everything started to go wrong. The man behind the desk was short and losing his hair, but he had the dark eyes of a Hoennese. He glanced up briefly at Andrei and said: "Name?"

"A-Andrei Johnson," he said automatically, and he had to, if he didn't get his name marked off he would be in trouble, Mrs. Malthrop had been very clear about that. But now they knew his name he was afraid he would get in trouble for spitting at the official, and his family might suffer. The man was asking him other questions, and he was answering, and all too quickly it was over.

"You confirm that this is your only Pokeball, and that it contains your only Pokemon?"

"Yes, sir." Andrei said.

"And you agree to relinquish both said items to the custody of the Protectorate Government for safekeeping?"

"Y-yes, sir."

"Place your Pokeball in the tray, please." Said the official.

_Pig! _Said Andrei in his imagination. Real Andrei said nothing, and put the Pokeball in the tray.

The soldier standing beside the tray picked it up, pressed the release button and pointed it at the floor. Cyndaquil shot out of the ball and landed on the wooden boards, blinking in surprise. She turned her head in curiosity, and for a moment her eyes met Andrei's. Then the soldier grunted in satisfaction and zapped her back inside the Pokeball.

"Next, please." Said the official. Real Andrei hung his head and walked out the door, the Houndoom snuffling at his pockets as he went past.

For his seventh birthday his brother had taken a photograph of him and his Cyndaquil. He had had it framed, with a bronze plaque that read: _You teach me, and I'll teach you._ When Andrei had gotten sick with mono in fifth grade she had sat by his bed for three months. When he had been lonely in the first weeks of high school, she had been there to accompany him. As he stepped out into the cold sunlight of the city, he knew that even if he was not a trainer like his brother he should never have let them be separated. He should have done anything to keep them together. But now it was too late and when he got home he put the picture in the garbage, underneath some paper towels so that his parents wouldn't see.


	3. Blackthorn City, 1998

Blackthorn City rumbled with a thousand hurrying feet, human and Pokemon. Fliers of every shape and size went back and forth through the narrow canyon gap between earth and sky. Radios chattered, privates disassembled their tents, officers rode their Pokemon up and down the hill with paperwork flapping from their hands. The civilians stayed inside their homes, watching with furtive Diglett eyes from between curtains. News had arrived two days ago: the main body of the Protectorate forces was moving from Ecruteak toward the mountains, and would reach Blackthorn within two weeks.

"They should have held it." A toothless old woman loomed from a doorway, white rims in her eyes as she approached Anna. "They should have held it." She repeated.

"It's a tactical retreat." Anna said, mouthing the words from the briefings. "The Republic will triumph in the end."

The woman caught her sleeve and tugged at it. Her voice was dry and leathery. "They should have held it." She said. "What will my son do when they come? He's caught a Pidgey."

Anna gently removed herself from the woman's grasp. "The Pokemon should be released into the wild, and the Pokeball handed over to Republican authorities." She said stiffly. "Every little counts in the struggle for freedom." When August Tepe said something like that it would sound sincere and powerful; in her mouth they were just words.

"Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in a hurry." She moved on up the hill. She didn't look back in case the woman was still standing there.

Blackthorn was built in a valley that was more like a crevice between two mountains, with steep rock walls rising up on either side. The Strategic Centre was cut halfway into the west wall, a tall empty chamber that had been a church before the invasion. The cluttered floor was populated by military bureaucrats who two years ago had been regular bureaucrats. The room buzzed with urgency; a clerk with a clipboard barged past her and clucked his tongue in annoyance. Colonel Satchmoore presided over them from the rear, his desk replacing the pulpit.

Satchmoore's Nidoking glared at Anna from behind his shoulder as he shuffled papers around the desk. From behind a bushy moustache he said: "Catsworthy, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir." She replied, sitting when he gestured for her to do so. "You sent for me?"

"I did, I did." Said Satchmoore. "Which one is she again?"

"Nido." Said his Nidoking.

"The overseas student, that's right." He smiled thinly at her. The Colonel's language-bond with his Pokemon was impressive, but Anna thought he was always a little too eager to show it off.

"You've studied abroad, yes? In Kanto?"

"Saffron City, sir. Politics course at SCU."

"Lucky you didn't get trapped over there, isn't it?"

Anna nodded. "I had to cut short the last year of my degree when I heard that they were talking about locking the ports." She said.

"And yet you returned, into the very teeth of a civil war." Satchmoore mused. "That shows admirable loyalty, private."

"Thankyou sir. I'm determined to do everything I can for Johto, sir."

"Excellent." The Colonel picked up a sheet of paper and held it close to his face. "You may get the opportunity to do just that, Catsworthy. How would you feel about returning to Kanto?"

Anna felt a chill of shock run down her spine. This was not what she was expecting, nothing like… "I feel my place is here in the homeland, sir." She managed.

"As it is." Satchmoore nodded. "But for the good of homeland, it may be better if you are to travel abroad. With the new diplomatic situation between Kanto and Hoenn, it is imperative that we of the Republican Guard maintain a close liaison with Saffron City. As you have prior experience in the country, you are a natural choice for this mission."

Anna took a deep breath, touched her hand to her forehead. "I-I'm not sure… I'm supposed to be testifying in Corporal Hamon's trial..."

"Private, surely you should realise that that trial has been postponed." Satchmoore said brusquely. "Tribunal proceedings must unfortunately take a back seat until the Fifth Battalion is in a more stable situation."

Anna floundered, searching for excuses. "I'd expected to be serving alongside my fellow Johtoans during the new offensive…"

The Nidoking exhaled sharply. "Nidoking." It said, emphasizing the word with a stamp of its foot.

"What my Pokemon is trying to say is that this is a direct order from your commanding officer." Said Colonel Satchmoore. "You will travel to Kanto; as an enlisted member of the Republican Guard, you are not in a position to debate the issue."

"I know that, sir." Anna said quickly. "I… thankyou for this opportunity, sir."

She stood to leave, her eyes cast downward, but Satchmoore brought her back with a sharp cough.

"You and the others selected for this mission will leave from Cherrygrove in five days' time. Prepare your belongings before then."

"Yes, thankyou sir." Anna bowed awkwardly, anxious to get away.

"And private…" Satchmoore beamed at her. "Cheer up. You're going to do great things for your country."

Anna smiled weakly and fled.

* * *

Zack was crouched apelike over a green kit bag, trying to squeeze it closed and tie off the string before it popped open again. His thick black hair fell over his eyes, and stirred a little in front of his lips when he breathed out. Andrei sat cross-legged in the shadow of the tent, cleaning his gun with hurried motions. Their platoon was encamped at the bottom of the slope where Blackthorn was built, just below the old city walls. The women's tents lay on one side of the road and the men's on the other.

"Anna!" Zack called out to her across the dusty yard. "You packed up yet? Not much time now!"

Anna clutched her arm uncomfortably as she walked towards them.

"No, I'm not finished yet." She said quietly.

"I wanted to talk to you." Zack added. "Listen, that military lawyer, Hope, came by to talk to us about the trial. He wants to go over your statement again before we leave."

He stopped. She was standing close in front of him now and he could tell from her face that something was wrong.

"The trial's been postponed." She said quietly. "Just like the Corporal said it would be."

Andrei looked up from his kit, but said nothing.

"What the hell's going to happen to her, then?" Zack gave the kit bag a last angry jerk to secure it. "Is she still suspended from duty?"

"They can't reinstate her before she goes to the tribunal." Andrei said.

"Arceus." Said Zack. "What kind of Kafka shit is that?"

"Maybe it's better this way." Anna ventured. "You know she was probably going to be found guilty anyway."

Andrei snapped his gun back together with a sharp flick of his wrists. Anna stood in silence for a moment as they struggled with their gear.

"Also." She said. "I won't be going with you. To Indigo Plateau, I mean."

Zack near jumped to his feet in surprise. Andrei just looked at her.

"I've been sent back to Kanto." She said. "As a liaison with the liberation forces."

She stood and waited for one of them to say something, but neither of them did. The silence settled like resin between them.

"That's all I wanted to say." She said at last. "I have to finish packing now."

"A-at least you'll be safe." Said Zack. "In Kanto." He laughed. "I bet you'll come back with a whole army behind you, right?"

"Good luck on your journey." Said Andrei dully.

"We'll see each other again before I leave." Anna said, almost apologetically. "I really have to finish packing up my gear."

Her chest squeezed with the awkwardness of their conversation, she turned and hurried away toward the road.

_I won't be going with you to the Indigo Plateau. _When she'd said those words, her mind had been carried back to the early days of their first year at Goldenrod U. They'd been at a bar, up late when they should have been studying. In those days students at Goldenrod had existed in a bubble where Hoenn and the Protectorate Government didn't even seem to exist. On a flickery old television they'd watched the finals of the Plateau Conference. It was the first time in five years that the Hoennese domination of the championship had been broken, and when, past midnight, the great old Aggron fell to its knees, it had seemed as if the whole world was cheering.

"In three years time we'll be out of here." Andrei had said. "When we finish I'm going to buy a van and the three of us are going to drive to Indigo Plateau, yeah? Yeah? We're gonna see this for real."

Anna and Andrei had put their hands on top of each other on the table, and Zack had done it too even though he said it was stupid.

"It's a date." She said. "You two, me, and the Elite Four. Three years from now."

Eight months later the Elite Four had been killed in a border skirmish. A year after that was when Anna had boarded the S. S. Aqua for Kanto.


	4. Goldenrod Riots, 1995

In their first year of university they went to a demonstration that turned ugly outside the Radio Tower. Three days before had been the battle on Indigo Plateau and the execution of the Elite Four. The prohibition against public assembly had only inflamed the crowd further. They were marching with ten thousand people from the old gym, which at the time had been shut down pending renovations into a training camp.

Anna was wearing a plastic hat shaped like Suicune's horns. A girl had been passing them out further down the street. Zack had wanted one of the Entei masks, but they were all gone before he got there. Andrei climbed up on the bonnet of a car with a bunch of community college girls, one of whom had a loudspeaker that she passed around the group. Nobody could hear what anyone else was saying, but their sentiments rose out of the babble like a Lapras surfacing from beneath the ocean. There were not only students there but older men and women, salarymen, homeowners, even a few children. They were shouting that they had had enough.

They lost Andrei in the crowd, long before the Radio Tower. More than likely he would turn up the next day from some girl's house whom he'd met at the rally. Andrei was like that in those days. Zack and Anna held hands to keep from getting separated, and back then Zack didn't even think about it, they were just friends. Banners waved over their heads: _JUSTICE FOR ELITE FOUR, _they read, and _PROTECTORATE OUT _and _JOHTO POWER!_

Everything was going right for a moment, a few minutes, a few hours. In a crowd like that, nobody could help but feel that change was imminent. It seemed as though nothing could stand in the way of so many people moving together and shouting with one voice.

Then the gas came down.

It began, as it always did, with someone in the crowd pulling a Pokeball. The sweeps during Custody had never been completely effective, and there were always breeders and trainers supplementing their collections in secret. Afterwards, some people said that the first deployment had been unprovoked, others that it was in self-defence. Certainly there had been soldiers around the Radio Tower trying to keep the crowd back from the doors. The first one that Zack saw was a Pinsir, its thorny horns standing out above the heads of the marchers. Whether that was the first, he never found out. Within moments, other flashes of energy were going off all around them, and Pokemon were emerging from their balls. Some people cheered; others turned and pushed through the crowd to get away as fast as they could. They were the veterans, the ones who had been to these kinds of rallies before.

A siren began to wail. There were other flashes now, not from the crowd but from just beyond it, in uniform rows. Dark, lumpen shapes rose up into the air, the sun behind them. The Goldenrod Protectorate Forces' Civil Pacification Squad had deployed their Koffings and Weezings.

The sight of them turned the mob into a different kind of beast. With a roar, those foremost in the crowd pressed forward against the barricades in front of the Radio Tower steps. Riot police thrust back at them with plastic shields and truncheons. Behind them, further down the street, a contingent of Donphans and Nosepasses were coming to reinforce the line. As they came closer it was unclear whether the people at the front of the crowd were pushing to get into the Radio Tower or to get away from the armoured Pokemon coming towards them.

Zack clutched Anna's hand tightly as the mob moved like an ocean about them, carrying them wherever the current willed. The first line of Koffings was above them now, and the air began to fill with the sharp scent of tear gas. The tides shifted in an instant. All the fervour that had pushed the protestors forward now seemed to be inverted, had become terror, and they were fleeing.

Zack's skin began to tingle and his eyes stung. The air between him and Anna was turning a hazy green colour. They were running, everyone was running, and suddenly he knew that if he tripped and fell he would die. There were people on the ground. There was shouting, and a high-pitched scream like a bird, and a voice blaring incomprehensible words through a bullhorn.

His face was burning. Water swelled from his eyes, like onions but more piercing, until he was blind. He choked on fire in his lungs. The only thing he was aware of was Anna's hand in his, and the pounding of his feet on the pavement. Once he forced his eyes open against the pain, and all he could see was mustard-coloured smoke all around him.

There was a concussion behind him that nearly knocked him off his feet. The next day he would learn that it had been a Typhlosion's lava plume going off in the middle of the Donphan regiment. There would be a six-foot crater in the middle of the road outside the Radio Tower, and a red smear where the volcano Pokemon had died. But that was in the future, and in the present he was running, his throat was closing against the boiling air, and he realised that he had let go of Anna's hand.

He stopped. Someone slammed into him and they both fell, but the crowd was growing thinner now and he was able to scramble back to his feet. He had run a long way, and the smoke was clearing somewhat, but it was all he could do to keep his eyes open against the awful stinging.

"Anna!" he shouted, but it came out as the croak of an old man on his deathbed. He couldn't see more than a few feet in front of him. He stumbled blindly back into the poison mist, shouting her name more hoarsely each time, until he fell to his knees beside a fire hydrant and threw up. That was when he realised he had to leave.

He found Anna fifteen minutes later, in an alley outside a dive bar that had suddenly become a refuge for student protestors. She was sitting on a milk crate and drinking from a huge bottle of water, tears rolling down her face from her red-rimmed eyes. The gas was two blocks away. The march was over. He sat down beside her without saying anything and grasped her hand again.

Hoennese soldiers moved through the streets over the next three hours, enforcing an extraordinary curfew. When it came to his turnoff and he had to let go of Anna's hand again, his own hands began to shake, and would not stop for hours after he got home. The stinging and itching in his skin remained throughout the night and into the morning.

It was two days before they were able to return to Goldenrod U. When they saw Andrei he was smiling, but in a way that showed he was guilty about his happiness. He had escaped the gas entirely, but a minor cut on his leg had been treated by a girl named Kimberley, who had allowed him to convalesce in her flat downtown.


	5. Route 46, 1998

Andrei clung to the back of his Bayleef as it descended the steep slopes of Route 46. Beside him, the other members of his platoon rode if they were lucky enough to have been issued a Pokemon that could carry them, or else had to scramble on foot through the scree. Trees crowded in on either side of the track, and the mountains loomed behind them. Further down the road, the main body of Fifth Battalion was reaching the foothills where the path fed into Route 29. There was a chill silence in the forest around them, the wild Pokemon having been frightened away by the huge number of humans moving through their territory.

Zack's Totodile was balled up on his belt, being less than useless in these mountainous regions. He kept it balled almost all the time, and Andrei couldn't help remembering the other Totodile, the one that had been taken from Zack into the 'custody' of the Protectorate.

Sergeant Summers, his piglike eyes squinting from beneath his camo helmet, was riding on a hugely fat Tauros. Corporal Hamon walked; her Skiploom had been taken from her when she was court-martialled in Blackthorn, and her rank suspended until the tribunal.

The radio set was perched precariously between his arms, slipping back and forth with the Bayleef's plodding stride. It was nearly six o'clock. He turned the dial, and a fuzz of static and half-heard voices crackled forth from the box. Every evening he did this, and every evening he finished wondering if he should feel disappointed or relieved.

He was listening to hear if his parents were alive or dead.

"Dunbar, Q. Dvorak, P." the announcer intoned. "Eachise, N. Eachise, S. Edwards, A." Andrei strained his ears, as if the very intensity of his listening could push them onto the survivor list.

"Enterbrain, V. Eom, E."

"Private!" Andrei leaned back quickly and almost dropped the radio. Sergeant Summers was glaring at him. "Put that thing away this instant!" he hissed. "Have you forgotten that we are seeking to avoid enemy confrontation at this time?" He made a rolling gesture with his head, encompassing the forest on either side. "Have you ever seen what a razor leaf can do to a man's face, private?"

"No, sir." Andrei said quietly, stowing the radio set in his bag.

"Do you want to, private?"

"No, sir."

"Then stow that radio and keep quiet." Satisfied that his authority had been exercised, the Sergeant spurred his Tauros on ahead.

Zack spat on the ground, an affectation he had taken up recently that suited him badly. "That's the way, Sergeant." He muttered, too low for Summers to hear. "If the enemy were here, they wouldn't notice five hundred Republican soldiers tramping past their position. But if somebody cracks out a radio, well." He laughed humourlessly.

Corporal Hamon said nothing. When she had had her stripes she would have had no hesitation in criticising the Sergeant for his asinine behaviour. But now, in a limbo below that of the lowliest enlisted soldiers, she knew better than to press her luck.

On the far side of the foothills, they could see the ocean for the first time.

* * *

They made camp at the base of Route 46, close to the rear of Fifth Battalion's forces. Most of the army was already moving east towards Indigo Plateau. As the night closed in, soldiers with Cyndaquils stood guard around the perimeter of the camp, their fiery spines illuminating a small patch of the dark woods. Andrei and Zack were on fourth watch, so they slid into their sleeping bags and tried to get a few hours of rest. Every time a Hoothoot cried, Andrei's eyes flicked open again.

At two o'clock in the morning, Corporal Hamon beat on the wall of their tent and told them in hushed tones to get up and strike camp on the double.

"What's going on?" Andrei called out to her as he fumbled around for his fatigues.

"Sergeant won't tell me." Hamon said grimly. "But it looks like we're moving out."

Half an hour later their little patch of civilisation had been folded up and put back into canvas bags. Sergeant Summers stood at the top of a small bluff, looking down on his platoon of half-trained middle-class students.

"We're moving out." He said redundantly. "General Simkiss has assigned us to a special mission. While the main body of Fifth Battalion moves to meet up with Kanto forces on the Indigo Plateau, we will be travelling in the opposite direction."

Murmurs of alarm and discontent ran through the group. Corporal Hamon's face darkened, and she looked at her feet.

"We will be accompanying a crack squad of pokemarines, formerly of Violet City. This platoon's task will be to provide support, reconnaissance and reinforcement to them."

"How the hell did this outfit get paired with a pokemarine squad?" Zack hissed. Andrei shrugged.

"Most likely," said the Corporal, "somebody swept us into this pile without even bothering to find out what our capabilities were." She turned away and cursed into the dark. "Arceus! They're just kids!"

She pointed an accusing finger at Zack. "It's not just your safety I'm talking about here. It's about me dying out there too because I was trying to keep you fuck-ups out of trouble."

Zack and Andrei stared at her, taken aback. A good deal of the other troops had heard and were looking at her as well.

"Do you have something to say, private?" Sergeant Summers snapped, pronouncing her title with undisguised smugness.

"No, sir." Said Hamon.

"Good. Now go and finish your preparations. We're on the move in fifteen minutes."

The platoon dispersed. Their lone, weary Donphan was loaded up with tents and excess baggage, while the better part of each soldier's kit was carried on his back. Off to their right there was movement in the darkness, the occasional flicker of a Pokemon deployment, and they knew the marines were preparing to move as well.

Zack shrugged on his backpack and grimaced at the weight.

"Where's Anna?" Corporal Hamon snapped, approaching them as if her outburst at the briefing had never occurred.

"She's been reassigned." Said Zack. "She's taking surf to Kanto."

Andrei clipped his Pokeball to his belt. "We didn't get to say goodbye." He said dully. "We were supposed to see her again before she left."

"No time now." Said the Corporal. "You'll see her again when the war's over."

Andrei turned and looked over his shoulder at the lights of Cyndaquils and Rapidashes further down the road. Beneath one of those lights was a tent where she slept, ignorant as yet that they had already left her.

When Andrei had been eight years old, his father had promised to take him to the Safari Zone. "Not just yet, son," he'd said, "but soon. When the war's over."


	6. En Route to Kanto

Cherrygrove City was a smudge of silvery rectangles on the far side of the bay. Every so often there would come a clatter of distant gunfire, or a burst of tracer bullets in the grey predawn. Magnemites had come down all across the area and no radio transmissions could get through. Nobody in Fifth Battalion had been able to tell them whether Cherrygrove was in the hands of the loyalists, the Hoennese, or neither. Captain Argyle had made the decision to set sail from a deserted beach, far enough from the city to be safe regardless of the outcome of that battle.

There were eight of them in the team: the Captain, four serious soldiers, and two diplomats. There was nobody else like Anna, a half-trained student with some half-assed knowledge of Kanto. She wondered why she had been assigned to this operation. Probably just swept under the carpet of military bureaucracy, as Corporal Hamon used to say.

Captain Argyle walked down the beach until he was standing in the wet sand at the water's edge, his heavy boots sinking slowly. He had a fat face and a chunky body, but there was a toughness in his eyes that Anna thought she could respect. He moved with an awareness of his surroundings that reminded her more of Corporal Hamon than Sergeant Summers.

With a practised movement he drew from his belt the second Pokeball that marked him in this company as a high-ranking officer. Most soldiers could only afford a single Pokemon; even if they thought to catch some low-level cannon fodder in the woods, there weren't enough Pokeballs to go around. Empty balls were given to expert trainers who could be certain of catching their target without breaking the valuable ball. Even the Captain had fielded only a single companion until last night, when he was issued with a valuable Lapras.

The blue Transport Pokemon glowed briefly as it emerged from confinement, illuminating the shallow water and scattering a handful of heavy-lidded Magikarp that had been idling beneath the surface. Argyle's Lapras let out a brief roar, blinking as it examined its new environment.

"Give her a moment." Said the Captain. "Poor girl hasn't been taken out since she was in Olivine, few years ago."

Soon the huge creature settled down and bowed its head towards the surface of the sea. Even when a Hyper Beam went off in the city across the water, the Lapras hardly stirred. Infrequently used Pokemon would get this way, Anna had seen them before. Life was a blur of confusing images for them; weeks or months could pass by in an instant while they were held in stasis within the Pokeballs. Unable to comprehend their environment, they submitted meekly to their owners' wills in the hope and trust that one day they would be released.

The eight of them could fit quite comfortably on the Lapras' rugged shell. As the sun crept above the water in the east, they surfed off into open water, putting distance between themselves and the Hoennese patrols before they turned toward Kanto. By the time it was fully light, Cherrygrove was almost out of sight and the ocean stretched around them on all sides.

The soldiers conversed with each other in hushed tones, swapping words that Anna didn't understand. As the day grew hotter they cleaned their weapons and oiled the springs of their Pokeballs. The two diplomats sat together at the rear of the shell and stared off into space. One of them was a woman – the only woman on board besides Anna herself – so she crawled over to introduce herself. The rocking motion caused by the Lapras' fins made it difficult to move unless she crawled crabwise, he hands gripping at the bumps in the shell.

"Hey." She said. "I'm Anna."

The woman looked at her with sad eyes. Her hair was pale blonde, almost white, and her face was pockmarked as if by acne scars or acid.

"She doesn't talk." Said the man sitting on the other side of the blonde woman.

"I'm sorry?" Anna asked. The man was older, with short brown hair that was just starting to turn grey.

"Has a Meowth that speaks for her." He said, gesturing to the red and white globe on the woman's belt. "Can't get it out right now, might upset our ride."

He smiled. "I'm Marcus. This is Joanna. Pleased to meet you."

"Yeah, you too…" Anna said awkwardly. "Um, if you don't mind me asking, aren't you guys the diplomats? How exactly can she do that if she doesn't… talk?"

Marcus shrugged. "Well, I just met her a few days ago. Apparently her Pokemon can tell what she's thinking, but honestly I'm not so sure the damn thing doesn't just make everything up by itself."

"The Pokemon makes decisions for itself?" Anna asked. The thought made her feel distinctly uncomfortable. Talking Pokemon always gave her the creeps.

"Just joking." Said Marcus. "Probably. I don't know."

Joanna was still staring mildly in Anna's direction. If she was concerned with the way that they were talking about her right in front of her face, she gave no sign of it.

The sun rose high overhead and beat down mercilessly upon them. Anna leant Marcus some of her sunblock after he realised that he'd forgotten to bring any of his own. She told him about how she'd studied in Kanto and he told her about his tenure as an ambassador there – five years in Celadon City before the war began, ten years of political limbo among the nationalists-in-exile.

Every so often they would pause, and a silence would descend upon the conversation which somehow always seemed to emerge from the presence of Joanna. Sometimes she followed them with her eyes, other times she gazed out at the flat landscape of the ocean. Constantly, Anna was aware of her.

During one of these lulls, Anna looked at Joanna's face and followed her gaze out to sea. She was looking at a boat on the horizon, and Anna opened her mouth to say something when one of the soldiers called out "Ship ahoy!"

Captain Argyle stood on the ridge of the Lapras' back, shading his eyes against the sun. "Prepare for combat, but avoid any display of aggression." He said. "We're in Kanto waters now, there should be no danger."

Anna scrambled to make ready, always a few steps behind the hardcore soldiers. They had their guns out and their Pokeballs ready to deploy while she was still fumbling with her belt. The boat drew closer, refusing to resolve into any shape that might give a clue as to whether it was friendly or dangerous.

Captain Argyle raised a spyglass to better observe the interloper. "Looks like an old Kanto fisher. Alright – " and then the back of his head disappeared into a fine red mist.

Anna never even got a chance to see what was happening. All she knew was that the soldiers were firing their machine-guns, Pokeballs were flashing as Cyndaquils and Totodiles deployed into combat. Marcus threw himself onto the Lapras' shell, and Joanna cringed away from the ear-shattering bark of the small arms fire.

Anna brought up her own gun and tried to aim down the sight as she had been taught. Something was moving underneath the surface of the water, making it swell and roll. The Lapras' eyes rolled back in fear, and it thrashed its flippers rapidly to keep itself facing toward the unseen threat.

"Fire!" shouted someone, and a barrage of water guns slammed into the surface of the sea, throwing up salty spray in great clusters. The Lapras added to the volley with a whistling jet of ice.

The thing under the water burst up into the air, scales shimmering, sinuous body winding into the sky. The Gyarados reared up in front of Argyle's Lapras and the two great seabeasts were eye to eye for a moment. Then a gout of flame issued from the sea dragon's mouth, the Lapras capsized, and everything was water.

When Anna managed to claw her way back to the surface, there was no sign of the Lapras, save for a wide stain of blood in the water. Marcus was gasping and spluttering nearby, struggling to keep his head above the maroon-tinged waves. The Gyarados was a serpentine shadow blotting out the sun above them. With a terrible stomach sensation Anna realised that she had dropped her gun and her Pokeball. Diving for it was impossible; the water had become totally opaque with the Lapras' blood. For some reason the only thing she could think about while she paddled water there in the middle of the ocean was the young Hoothoot inside her Pokeball, sinking into the dark depths, never to be released again. Would it be just like dying? Like going to sleep and never waking up again?

When she came out of her reverie the boat was looming huge above her. Some of the others in her team were treading water as well, looking up sullenly at the prow as the Gyarados swooped down and disappeared in a flash of light back into its Pokeball.

"Good afternoon!" called a man from the deck of the boat. "Stay where you are, and we'll throw down a rope. Try to escape or resist, and we will shoot you. You are now in the custody of Team Rocket."


End file.
